Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Then he came back to the two women, stopped in front of them, impatient again, and quickly finished the story, the way you sometimes rush to the end of a bedtime story when you can’t wait to clap the book shut at last and turn out the light. ‘Then I crossed the Swiss border on foot. Wladimir Rosenbaum got hold of a work permit for me. He knows an official who likes to meet up with ballerinas. Shall we go?’

Their footsteps rang out in the sleeping city. And there was no conversation for them to drown out.

First they brought Rachel home, and then Herr Grün insisted on walking Désirée to Morgartenstrasse as well. Outside the door — she had already opened it — he stopped and took off his hat.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking,’ said Herr Grün. ‘Even though one can’t actually say that. You don’t do thoughts. They do themselves. They eat their way through your head like worms through wood.’

‘And where have your woodworms crept to?’ Perhaps Désirée was smiling, but it was impossible to tell in the darkness.

‘You have lost someone you were very fond of,’ said Herr Grün. ‘That is obvious. You’ve been alone since then. That is obvious too. And I…’

‘No,’ she said.

‘We go well together.’

‘No, Herr Grün.’ She had expected his question and formulated the answer long ago. ‘We are too similar. Two left shoes, bent in the same direction. But two left shoes don’t make a pair.’

‘I’m not that much older than you.’

Now Désirée really was smiling, you could tell even without any light. ‘And you aren’t that much older than Rachel either,’ she said.

‘Fräulein Kamionker?’

‘Yes,’ said Désirée. ‘You need someone you can argue with.’

Her lips ran softly over his without really touching them, and then the door had closed behind her and the key turned in the lock.

Herr Grün didn’t bring Rachel flowers, and she didn’t put a picture of him on her desk. Still: the relationship between them was noticed, and there was much talk in the kosher clothes factory. Not just because Rachel was the boss’s daughter, although of course that made the story even more interesting, but because Joni Leibowitz opened a book on the subject. You put a franc on a particular date, and the one closest to the day the engagement was officially announced won the whole pot. So, for example, early dates were much sought-after because it was said that Rachel and Herr Grün had been seen together at the cinema, You Are My Happiness with Beniamino Gigli and Isa Miranda, and even during the big aria they hadn’t looked at the screen once, so preoccupied were they with each other. Then again it was said that the couple had been seen arguing loudly over a coffee in the Old India on Bahnhofplatz, which meant the whole thing was over. Joni revealed this with hand-rubbing satisfaction, because as banker he had reserved nil for himself, which meant: if no shidduch had happened within six months, the whole pot went to him. So sure was he of his win that he had already spent, as an advance, some of the stakes he was supposed to be administrating. ‘Rachel will never marry,’ that was his firm conviction, because she had after all, nearly twenty years before, fended off his advances, and that could mean only that the woman was frigid.

Both the rumours were incidentally true, and false. Herr Grün really hadn’t heard anything of Beniamino Gigli, not, however, because he had been using the darkness of the cinema to canoodle, but because he had fallen asleep during the first act. And that in turn had to do with politics. The Frontists had decided that the scantily clad dancers in Wladimir Rosenbaum’s revues were undermining public morals in a typically Jewish way, and to prevent graffiti and broken windows a round-the-clock guard had been mounted around the Corso. After a sleepless night even the most musical of love stories can’t keep you awake.

The argument in the Old India had actually happened as well, but anyone who had bet for that reason on a failure of the relationship was backing the wrong horse by miles. Rachel and Herr Grün enjoyed arguing with one another, as two jazz musicians enjoy improvising variations on a given tune together. And Rachel had to admit that Herr Grün was by far her superior in verbal combat, or rather: she would have had to admit it if the admission of any kind of weakness had not been so alien to her nature.

Her Grün complimented her, and she insulted him for it. Or else she insulted him and he complimented her about it. Désirée had been right: they needed one another.

At first they didn’t see each other very often. By day Rachel sat in the office, and in the evening Herr Grün was in the Corso. Then they gradually stole more and more time for each other. He still had his room with the Posmanik family, but he no longer slept there every night. ‘He has so much to do that he spends the night in the theatre,’ Frau Posmanik explained to little Aaron.

No one in the kosher clothes factory knew anything about the event that would have influenced the betting more than any other. For Rosh Hashanah, the New Year festival, Herr Grün had been invited to Zalman and Hinda’s for an official lunch. Désirée, Arthur and the Rosenthals were also coming to Rotwandstrasse; on such days the family should be together. Such an invitation, one would think, is not a special occasion among adults, but in the run-up Rachel was as touchy as a teenager who is about to present her boyfriend to the family for the first time. Even so, Herr Grün refused to put on anything but the suit he always wore. Still: he put on the new bow tie she had bought for him, and even brought flowers, even though that isn’t really appropriate for Rosh Hashanah.

Hinda had, as always at family occasions, taken a great deal of trouble cooking, and was disappointed that her guest ate so little. Until he explained to her that someone who has had to go hungry for a long time has only two options: give in to the unstinting desire to eat yourself to death, or else to keep strict control of yourself, not only when eating, and to keep a tight rein on your emotions. ‘It isn’t a wonderful life,’ said Herr Grün, ‘but being alive at all is more than I was allowed to expect.’

Of course the conversation turned to the situation in Germany. Adolf Rosenthal, who never turned down the opportunity to deliver a lecture, wanted to explain his favourite thesis over soup, namely that National Socialism would be destroyed by its internal contradictions, but Herr Grün just looked at him, from the side and without uttering a word of disagreement, which made the mathematician, who could not otherwise be interrupted, stutter and quickly change the subject.

It was exactly the way the drunk in the White Cross had reacted to Herr Grün’s calm voice, Rachel thought proudly. Hillel too was full of admiration for the man from Germany and said smarmily, ‘I’ve been in jail as well.’

‘No,’ said Herr Grün, ‘you were on holiday.’

It wasn’t really a comfortable meal; they weren’t living in comfortable times. They had, as is customary, begun the meal by dipping a piece of apple in honey, but no one thought it would be a sweet year because of that.

When the talk turned to Ruben, Herr Grün said, ‘Get him out of there. If you have anyone at all important to you in that country, get them out!’

Arthur took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘He doesn’t want to leave his congregation,’ said Hinda. Herr Grün reacted with so impatient a gesture that he knocked over the yontevdik salt cellar. ‘Go and fetch him back,’ he said to Zalman. ‘Rachel tells me you’ve fetched him back once before. From Galicia.’

Whereupon of course all the old stories had to be told, about the soldiers who ate soap in order to be signed off sick, and about the smokers looking for cigarette papers in the latrine, ‘this one’s clean, this one isn’t.’ Even though today was New Year and not Seder evening: stories about old deliverances are always welcome.